m >> no, i was in washington. and in reykjavik and geneva. >> on the reagan staff. >> trying to figure out what the russians were up to. from your point of view as a russian expert, what was going on in the russian mind as all of this was taking place? what was the importance of the emergence of gorbachev as the leader of the soviet union? >> there were a number of very important questions out there. i think we understand now better than we understood at the time one of the misperceptions i believe that we had was that the deployment of the s.s.-20's had been calculated in advance to be a threat to europe and to decouple the alliance. now, as we look back now, we find that they had not staffed this whatsoever and it was largely a matter of the inertia of the military complex. they would build them because they could and the foreign ministry was not consulted before their decision to deploy the ss-20. we now know there was a minority of opinion after the deployment that this was a strategic error because it would b